Auchindrain - More about us

For more than a thousand years from the early medieval period to the late 18

century

the main settlement type in Scotland was a small farming community. In Gaelic this

was known as a baile; in Scots a toun, in English a township. you didn’t live in a burgh

(what we, in the modern age, would think of as a conventional town or large village),

you lived in a township: there were very few burghs, but at one time or another upwards

of 4,000 townships. Townships were originally created by small groups of families who

occupied an area of the lands controlled by their clan, and who paid tribute in kind to

their chief. Later, they evolved into agricultural tenancies, where rent in money – but

sometimes also in kind – was paid to a landlord who may have been the clan chief, but

who often was not.

Townships had a number of distinctive features that characterise their nature and

organisation. The first was the presence of one or more clusters of buildings laid out in

a seemingly random pattern within the landscape. A second was an area, often not very large, of arable land, in Gaelic talamh-

àitich, which generally surrounded the buildings: this was enclosed by a wall known as a “head dyke”, in Gaelic gàradh-cinn, keep

grazing animals away from growing crops. A third was an extensive adjacent area of rough pasture known as the outrun, cùl-cinnin

Gaelic. A fourth was the existence of a corn kiln, in Gaelic ath-theiridh, used to dry grain before grinding for food use and to

prevent next year’s seed-corn from rotting.

The most significant feature of a township, however, was joint tenancy – a group of families holding and working the land in

common. The arable land, used to produce much of the community’s food, was worked on a system known as runrig, in Gaelic

roinn-ruithe: it was divided into narrow strips known as rigs that were allocated to the individual tenant families by drawing lots.

The main farming activity of a township was breeding cattle, and each year a proportion of the jointly-owned herd would be sold

either for slaughter or for fattening-up on Lowland farms. The cattle grazed on the outrun, and for much of the summer the

township’s women and girls would relocate to secondary settlements some distance away from the main settlement, known as

shielings – in Gaelic, àirigh – where they would look after the cattle and turn their milk into butter and cheese for consumption

during the rest of the year. This created a very distinctive social and economic structure that very substantially defines the nature

of rural Scotland before the modern age, and which is central to Gaelic culture and language.